Shocking news: Major new analysis confirms that #globalwarming is real
Cooling the warming debate: Major new analysis confirms that global warming is real.
It’s hard to believe that a study like this was even necessary. But that goes to show the extent to which climate change deniers have perverted climate science to make it appear as though there is a legitimate “debate” taking place among scientists about the reality of human-induced climate change.
In any case, this study from the University of California (Berkeley) confirms, yet again, that global warming is real and it takes specific aim at some of the charges that have been leveled by so-called “climate change skeptics” in their well-funded and relentless campaign to discredit climate science. What makes this particular study even more noteworthy is that it was funded by the right-wing billionaire oil barons and notorious climate change deniers, the Koch brothers, and it was carried out by a famous former skeptic Richard Muller who wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal that there are no longer any good reasons to be a skeptic of the basic fact that the world is warming.
In my experience, I have found that the arguments made by skeptics generally boil to one of three positions: that climate change is (a) a myth and the world is not warming; (b) real but not caused by humans; or (c) real and possibly or partially caused by humans but not to be overly concerned about (see just about everything written by Bjorn Lomborg for perhaps the most clever incarnation of this “what-me-worry” attitude).
While the Berkeley study does not consider points (b) and (c), it does conclude that the “new results agreed closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the U.S. and the U.K….This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”
Well, surprise surprise. At least we can all agree on that point. Or can we? Elizabeth Muller, co-founder and Executive Director of Berkeley Earth, said she hopes the Berkeley Earth findings will help “cool the debate over global warming by addressing many of the valid concerns of the skeptics in a clear and rigorous way.”
I share Ms. Muller’s hopes that this will once and for all put an end to the fabricated “debate” over whether the world is in fact warming. But even if this issue is resolved, I fear that no amount of science will convince the true deniers that humans are responsible for the warming or that we should actually do anything serious about it. This issue is not, and never was, about science after all. If taken seriously, the quandary of climate change presents an affront to the way many people view the human project – as a continuing arc of moral, economic and scientific progress. Suddenly, we are forced to confront the idea that human society and our economic systems need to change – dramatically. For some, this represents a threat to their financial security (i.e. oil companies). For others, coming to terms with the very idea of human-caused climate change and all its subsequent implications may be simply too much to bear.
